Transmediality against transphobia: the politics of transsexual self-portraiture in Fumettibrutti’s work between comics and photography

Abstract

The comic artist Fumettibrutti (nom de plume of Josephine Yole Signorelli) is currently one of the most successful figures of the prolific Italian graphic novel. After emerging from the underground comics scene thanks to an explicitly erotic style that attracted young readers and went viral on social media, Fumettibrutti came out as a transsexual woman with the publication of her graphic memoir P. La mia adolescenza trans [P. My Trans Adolescence] (2019). Since then, the artist has complemented her comics-based autobiography with numerous selfies disseminated on Facebook and Instagram, thus producing a transmedia narrative. The objective of this article is to explore Fumettibrutti’s ability to represent (trans)gender abuse and discrimination using the media of comics and photography and their interaction. This is done by means of a cross-disciplinary analysis that considers the mediality of comics and the convergence of technologies animating the practice of photographic self-portraiture. My contribution looks at the range of cultural products (graphic novels; comics and vignettes published online; online photographic self-portraits) that shape the artist’s transmedia storyworld on transphobic violence, considering both their artistic dimension and their communicative function. In particular, I am interested in understanding if the interplay between a medium that works on the basis of iconic abstraction (comics) and a medium that establishes an indexical relationship with objects (photography) opens up to new possibilities for the representation of discrimination against transsexual women.